Fasten your seatbelts

“Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night!”

Margo Channing

From: All about Eve – 1950

Here we are, just a few hours, then in a joint session of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate (plus 58 regional representatives) will be elected the new President of the Italian Republic. For weeks we heard names of unofficial candidates and as usual there was a debate about the opportunity to choose a woman (don’t worry, this won’t happen, not yet. We are not ready for this revolution!), then the 5Star Movement launched a democratic online poll (but only those who were already members of the movement before the 31 december 2012 could vote) and after the winner of this singular poll (the reporter Milena Gabanelli, a woman) and the second (Gino Strada, war surgeon and founder of the Italian NGO Emergency) declined the offer, he third, Stefano Rodotà (a 80-year-old jurist and left-wing politician) became their official candidate. In the meantime MrB asked that the new President of the Republic would be a man who could give him protection (you know he has some little trouble with justice) and it seems that after playing for time PD (the Democratic Party, the biggest centre left Italian party) has chosen to help him proposing a name he could like: is Franco Marini, 80-year-old PD member, ex-member of the Christian Democracy Party (the right-wing party that dominated Italian politics for almost fifty years until its demise in 1994), ex-trade unionist (he was the leader of CISL, the catholic union), and ex- Senate speaker (2006-2008). Unfortunately the left party SEL ( PD’s allied) and many members of PD already said they are not going to vote him (see why MrB like him so much?).

It’s going to be a bumpy night indeed, and probably there will also be many bumpy days to come, in fact to elect the President of the Republic a two-thirds vote is required on any of the first three rounds of balloting and only after that, a majority suffices (but surely we are not going to break the record of 23 round necessary to elect Giovanni Leone in 1971).

It’s a pity that in the end PD decide not to propose Romano Prodi: MrB promised that if the former Prime minister, his arch-enemy, was elected he would leave Italy…